Labour in Irish History

by James Connolly

If there was a time when it behoved
men in public stations to be explicit, if ever there was a time
when those scourges of the human race called politicians
should lay aside their duplicity and finesse, it is the present
moment. Be assured that the people of this country will no longer
bear that their welfare should be the sport of a few family
factions; be assured they are convinced their true interest
consists in putting down men of self creation, who have no object
in view but that of aggrandising themselves and their families at
the expense of the public, and in setting up men who shall
represent the nation, who shall be accountable to the nation, and
who shall do the business of the nation.
-- Arthur O'Connor in Irish House of Commons,May 4, 1795.

Modern Irish History, properly understood,
may be said to start with the close of the Williamite Wars in the
year 1691. All the political life of Ireland during the next 200
years draws its colouring from, and can only be understood in the
light of that conflict between King James of England and William,
Prince of Orange. Our Irish politics, even to this day and
generation, have been and are largely determined by the light in
which the different sections of the Irish people regarded the
prolonged conflict which closed with the surrender of Sarsfield and
the garrison of Limerick to the investing forces of the Williamite
party. Yet never, in all the history of Ireland, has there been a
war in which the people of Ireland had less reason to be interested
either on one side or the other. It is unfortunately beyond all
question that the Irish Catholics of that time did fight for King
James like lions. It is beyond all question that the Irish Catholics
shed their blood like water, and wasted their wealth like dirt, in
an effort to retain King James upon the throne. But it is equally
beyond all question that the whole struggle was no earthly concern
of theirs; that King James was one of the most worthless
representatives of a worthless race that ever sat upon a throne;
that the `pious glorious and immortal' William was a mere adventurer
fighting for his own hand, and his army recruited from the
impecunious swordsmen of Europe who cared as little for
Protestantism as they did for human life; and that neither army had
the slightest claim to be considered as a patriot army combating for
the freedom of the Irish race. So far from the paeans of praise
lavished upon Sarsfield and the Jacobite army being justified, it is
questionable whether a more enlightened or patriotic age than our
own will not condemn them as little better than traitors for their
action in seducing the Irish people from their allegiance to the
cause of their country's freedom, to plunge them into a war on
behalf of a foreign tyrant -- a tyrant who, even in the midst of
their struggles on his behalf, opposed the Dublin Parliament in its
efforts to annul the supremacy of the English Parliament. The war
between William and James offered a splendid opportunity to the
subject people of Ireland to make a bid for freedom while the forces
of their oppressors were rent in a civil war. The opportunity was
cast aside, and the subject people took sides on behalf of the
opposing factions of their enemies. The reason is not hard to find.
The Catholic gentlemen and nobles who had the leadership of the
people of Ireland at the time were, one and all, men who possessed
considerable property in the country, property to which they had,
notwithstanding their Catholicity, no more right or title than
the merest Cromwellian or Williamite adventurer. The lands they
held were lands which in former times belonged to the Irish people
-- in other words, they were tribe- lands. As such, the peasantry --
then reduced to the position of mere tenants-at-will -- were the
rightful owners of the soil, whilst the Jacobite chivalry of King
James were either the descendants of men who had obtained their
property in some former confiscation as the spoils of conquest; of
men who had taken sides with the oppressor against their own
countrymen and were allowed to retain their property as the fruits
of treason; or finally, of men who had consented to seek from the
English Government a grant giving them a personal title to the lands
of their clansmen. For such a combination no really national action
could be expected, and from first to last of their public
proceedings they acted as an English faction, and as an English
faction only. In whatever point they might disagree with the
Williamites, they were at least in perfect accord with them on one
point -- viz., that the Irish people should be a subject people; and
it will be readily understood that even had the war ended in the
complete defeat of William and the triumph of James, the lot of the
Irish, whether as tillers of the soil or as a nation, would not have
been substantially improved. The undeniable patriotism of the rank
and file does not alter the truthfulness of this analysis of the
situation. They saw only the new enemy from England, the old English
enemy settled in Ireland they were generously, but foolishly, ready
to credit with all the virtues and attributes of patriotic Irishmen.

To further illustrate our point regarding
the character of the Jacobite leaders in Ireland we might adduce the
result of the great land settlement of Ireland in 1675. Eleven
million acres had been surveyed at the time, of which four million
acres were in the possession of Protestant settlers as the result of
previous confiscations.

Lands so held were never disturbed, but the
remainder were distributed as follows:

ACRES

To soldiers who had served in the
Irish Wars

2,367,715

To 49 officers

497,001

To adventurers (who had lent money)

707,321

To provisors (to whom land had been
promised)

477,873

To Duke of Ormond and Colonel
Butler

257,518

To Duke of York

169,436

To Protestant Bishops

31,526

The lands left to the Catholics were
distributed among the Catholic gentlemen as follows:

ACRES

To those who were declared
`innocent' that is to say, those who fought for freedom,but
had sided with the Government

1,176,750

To provisors (land promised)

497,001

Nominees in possession

68,260

Restitutions

55,396

To those transferred to Connaught,
under James I

541,330

It will be thus seen that with the
exception of the lands held in Connacht, all the lands held by the
Catholic gentry throughout Ireland were lands gained in the manner
we have before described -- as spoils of conquest or the fruits of
treachery. Even in that province the lands of the gentry were held
under a feudal tenure from the English Crown, and therefore their
owners had entered into a direct agreement with the invader to set
aside the rights of the clan community in favour of their own
personal claims. Here then was the real reason for the refusal of
the Irish leaders of that time to raise the standard of the Irish
nation instead of the banner of an English faction. They fought, not
for freedom for Ireland, nor for the restitution of their rights to
the Irish people, but rather to secure that the class who then
enjoyed the privilege of robbing the Irish people should not be
compelled to give way in their turn to a fresh horde of land
thieves. Much has been made of their attempt to repeal Poyning's Law

[Footnote: Poyning's Law made the Dublin
Parliament subordinate to the Parliament in London.]

and in other ways to give greater
legislative force to the resolutions of the Dublin Parliament, as if
such acts were a proof of their sincere desire to free the country,
and not merely to make certain their own tenure of power. But such
claims, on the part of some writers, are only another proof of the
difficulty of comprehending historical occurrences without having
some central principle to guide and direct the task.

For the benefit of our readers we may here
set forth the Socialist key to the pages of history, in order that
it may be the more readily understood why in the past the governing
classes have ever and always aimed at the conquest of political
power as the guarantee for their economic domination -- or, to put
it more plainly, for the social subjection of the masses -- and why
the freedom of the workers, even in a political sense, must be
incomplete and insecure until they wrest from the governing classes
the possession of the land and instruments of wealth production.
This proposition, or key to history, as set forth by Karl Marx, the
greatest of modern thinkers and first of scientific Socialist, is as
follows: --

That in every historical epoch the
prevailing method of economic production and exchange, and the
social organisation necessarily following from it, forms the basis
upon which alone can be explained the political and intellectual
history of that epoch.

In Ireland at the time of the Williamite
war the `prevailing method of economic production and exchange' was
the feudal method, based upon the private ownership of lands stolen
from the Irish people, and all the political struggles of the period
were built upon the material interests of one set of usurpers who
wished to retain, and another set who wished to obtain, the mastery
of those lands -- in other words, the application of such a key as
the above to the problem furnished by the Jacobite Parliament of
King James, at once explains the reason of the so called patriotic
efforts of the Catholic gentry. Their efforts were directed to the
conservation of their own rights of property, as against the right
of the English Parliament to interfere with or regulate such rights.
The so-called Patriot Parliament was in reality, like every other
Parliament that ever sat in Dublin, merely a collection of land
thieves and their lackeys; their patriotism consisted in an effort
to retain for themselves the lands of the native peasantry; the
English influence against which they protested was the influence of
their fellow thieves in England, hungry for a share of the spoil;
and Sarsfield and his followers did not become patriots because of
their fight against King William's government any more than an Irish
Whig out of his office becomes a patriot because of his hatred to
the Tories who are in. The forces which battled beneath the walls of
Derry or Limerick were not the forces of England and Ireland, but
the forces of two English political parties fighting for the
possession of the powers of government; and the leaders of the Irish
Wild Geese on the battle field of Europe were not shedding their
blood because of their fidelity to Ireland, as our historians
pretend to believe, but because they had attached themselves to the
defeated side in English politics. This fact was fully illustrated
by the action of the old Franco-Irish at the time of the French
Revolution. They in a body volunteered into the English army to help
to put down the new French Republic, and as a result Europe
witnessed the spectacle of the new republican Irish exiles fighting
for the French Revolution, and the sons of the old aristocratic
Irish exiles fighting under the banner of England to put down that
Revolution. It is time we learned to appreciate and value the truth
upon such matters, and to brush from our eyes the cobwebs woven
across them by our ignorant or unscrupulous history-writing
politicians.

On the other hand, it is just as necessary
to remember that King William, when he had finally subdued his
enemies in Ireland, showed by his actions that he and his followers
were animated throughout by the same class feeling and
considerations as their opponents. When the war was over William
confiscated a million and a half acres, and distributed them among
the aristocratic plunderers who followed him, as follows: --

These are a few of the men whose
descendants some presumably sane Irishmen imagine will be converted
into `nationalists' by preaching `a union of classes'.

It must not be forgotten, also, if only as
proof of his religious sincerity, that King William bestowed 95,000
acres, plundered from the Irish people, upon his paramour, Elizabeth
Villiers, Countess of Orkney. But the virtuous Irish Parliament
interfered, took back the land, and distributed it amongst their
immediate friends, the Irish Loyalist adventurers.